TechTakes

Bad feelings today. Google announced that an artist I like, Jacob Collier, has been working with them to develop an LLM based tool for music autoplag.

A little context: Collier has like 5 grammies, and is an incredibly creative artist that is able to take ideas and influence from disparate sources and synthesise something interesting (it’s not always good though…). Likely the greatest musician of his generation!

I don’t want to catastrophise too much here but I’m not looking forward to this being used as a cudgel from the promptfondlers.

The only open question I think is: to what extent is the music generation autoplag? (My guess, 100%)

More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Hallowe'en themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.

For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. It's like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.

Quick update: The open letter on AI training (https://aitrainingstatement.org/) has reached 15k signatures:

The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/

Edit: TIL about the US copyright office website’s ai generation info on works. That’s a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.

Not a sneer, but perhaps interesting even if less so as we are focusing a bit less here on the Rationalists. Twitter thread on race science bullshit popularized on the various Rationalism extended forums.

Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers

A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google's AI Overview.

Anyways, personal sidenote:

Beyond putting another blow to AI's reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.

I don’t go here but seeing these two posts come up within an hour on lobsters feels telling

https://devenv.sh/blog/2024/10/22/devenv-is-switching-nix-implementation-to-tvix/

https://determinate.systems/posts/announcing-determinate-nix/

I don't think there's a hell of a lot there that we don't already know and discuss at length, but it's cool to see Abby Thorne's new video at Philosophy Tube get into surveillance capitalism, neo-reaction/tech fascism, and how much of the discussion historically on and around social media misses the point.

It might be a decent overview reference for anyone in your life who isn't in as deep as we are, since you could do much worse in ~40 minutes.

ketamine of the masses / pulling this from my asses

In other news, there's been a statement on AI training that's racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:

Now, I'm way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I'll whip one out:

Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists' work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman's run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.

Vivaldi Browser has an important teaser AI announcement: https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/113351393167122198